                “I would never put it in the power of any printer or publisher to suppress or alter a work of mine, by making him master of the copy”                    Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1792.                        “The printer dares not go beyond his licensed copy”                    Milton, Aeropagetica, 1644.                        
Since time immemorial, unauthorized use and outright piracy of proprietary source material has been a source of lost revenue, confusion, and artistic corruption.
These historical problems have been compounded by the advent of digital technology. With it, the technology of copying materials and redistributing them in unauthorized manners has reached new heights of sophistication, and more importantly, omnipresence. Lacking objective means for comparing an alleged copy of material with the original, owners and litigation proceedings are left with a subjective opinion of whether the alleged copy is stolen, or has been used in an unauthorized manner. Furthermore, there is no simple means of tracing a path to an original purchaser of the material—something which can be valuable in tracing where a possible “leak” of the material first occurred.
As detailed below, different embodiments of the present technology address different problems of the prior art. For example, in one aspect, a steganographic marking is applied to a physical material, such as paper stock, plastic, or emulsion film, permitting such materials to be positively identified.
The foregoing and other aspects of the present technology will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.